Payment for goods and service via transaction cards and other negotiable instruments, such checks, is well known. A customer can pay for goods and services using a transaction card where transaction cards are accepted by a merchant as a form of payment. When accepted by merchants, payment for goods and services by use of a transaction card is often preferred since it is an easy, convenient and safe payment method and substantially reduces the need to carry cash or other more cumbersome instruments.
Some transaction card issuers have systems in place where purchase transaction data can be provided by a customer or card holder at the time of purchase. The purchase transaction data can be sent, via a payment system, to the card issuer and can ultimately be provided to a customer as part of a statement or a reconciliation file. The purchase transaction data can be identification information or descriptive information such as a customer's cost center, cost code, project number or other similar information or a brief description of the goods or service purchased.
Card issuers typically issue periodic statements to card holders that detail and itemize all transactions made using the card holder's card account during the period. The information included in the card statements is very useful to the card holder and can include the amount, date, location, category of each transaction, as well as the purchase transaction data.
The card holder's statements can be provided as traditional paper statements and/or as electronic files, e.g., over the internet. For ease of use in reconciling a card holder's records and accounts a reconciliation file may also be provided. When provided as electronic files, the data from the statement or reconciliation file may be uploaded to commonly used or proprietary accounts payable, general ledger, procurement and capital goods tracking systems. Such systems are offered by companies such as SAP, Bann, PeopleSoft, Great Lakes, Oracle, Walker and J.D. Edwards. The statements and reconciliation files, especially those that provide purchase transaction data, enable the card holder to track and monitor expenditures, to reconcile expenditures against the card holder's own records, or to use the card statement to fill in missing entries and information in the card holder's records. These record keeping advantages can be especially important in a business environment where detailed and accurate recordkeeping is critical to the success of the business enterprise and where recordkeeping may be mandated by governmental regulations. Transaction cards thus provide an excellent vehicle for both business and individual card holders to monitor and reconcile expenditures.
A drawback of using transaction cards, however, is that transaction cards are not universally accepted by all merchants. Thus, a card holder's ability to pay for goods and services using a transaction card, though substantial, is less than one hundred percent (100%). In these instances, card holders must pay for the goods and services with another form of payment, such as cash or another financial instrument. Other financial instruments may include money orders, traveler's checks, cashier's checks, bank checks. These other instruments can be inconvenient, impractical and/or unsafe. Further, most of these forms of payment do not provide any type of statement. Those that do provide statements, do not provide purchase transaction data that is gathered and provided in the statement for use by a customer to reconcile an account.
In addition, use of the other forms of payment that provide statements, such as checks, cause transaction card users to receive two separate statements, the first statement being from the transaction card issuer for the transaction card transactions and the second statement being from a bank for the check transactions. To provide customers with convenience, some transaction card companies issue “convenience checks” to card holders that can be used by card holders to pay for goods and services, especially with merchants that do not accept the transaction card for payment. The convenience checks are similar to typical checks, but are linked to the same account as the transaction card, so the customer receives only one periodic statement for both types of transactions. However, as described above, the information provided about the check purchases on the statement lacks purchase transaction data which has heretofore been provided for certain transaction card transactions.